The Monkees' Peter Tork, front, sings as he and the surviving members of the Monkees, Michael Nesmith, back left, and Micky Dolenz, back center, kickoff their reunion tour at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido on Thursday.
— Hayne Palmour IV / UT San Diego

Charlyn Sabo, from Yucaipa, California, shows her Monkees 1967 album, which she hopes Michael Nesmith will sign so she'll have all four signatures on the album, as she and other fans stand near the Monkees' tour bus, background, before the ...
— Hayne Palmour IV / UT San Diego

The three surviving Monkees, from left, Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork, perform as they kickoff their reunion tour at the California Center for the Arts.
— Hayne Palmour IV / UT San Diego

How do you replace the recently deceased lead singer of a legendary band whose very formation in the 1960s would have been impossible without him? How do you acknowledge his pivotal role, without slighting him or being overly sentimental?

Those were the key questions facing the three surviving members of The Monkees — Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith — Thursday night at California Center for the Arts, Escondido, where they kicked off a 12-city reunion trek. It marked Nesmith’s first tour with Dolenz and Tork in 15 years (and only his second tour as a Monkee since 1969).

Their answer was to salute Davy Jones, without trying to fill the void he left behind.

It was a wise move for the three Monkees and their seven-piece band, which included Nesmith’s son, Christian, on guitar and Dolenz’s sister, Coco, on backing vocals.

They performed for a near-capacity, multigenerational audience of more than 1,500. One Australian fan, Darryl Newitt, 50, flew in from Adelaide to attend the first four shows on The Monkees’ reunion tour. ("It was excellent. They did a very good job," Newitt, a CPA, said after the concert.)

Jones, the diminutive heartthrob of the band and the man around whom the hit TV series “The Monkees” was built in the mid-1960s, died Feb. 29 from a heart attack. He was 66. Trying to replace the irrepressible singer and dance-happy front man would have been distasteful and, frankly, impossible.

This was illustrated by the more than 40-year-old TV series and film clips of Jones and his fellow Monkees, which were used as a decades-leaping backdrop for much of Thursday’s concert. Then there was the set list, which omitted “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” “Valleri,” “Forget That Girl” and other songs that had featured Jones on lead vocals.

Instead, The Monkees mixed such hits as the Dolenz-led “Last Train To Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer” and the show-closing “Pleasant Valley Sunday” with 11 songs from the 1967 album “Headquarters” and six from "Head," the psychedelia-drenched soundtrack album to The Monkees’ 1968 feature film. "Headquarters" was the first Monkees' album to primarily feature material written by the group's members, who until then recorded songs written for them by Neil Diamond, Carole King and other top tunesmiths of the day.

It was ironic to hear cheers when the original trailer for the "Head" was shown, since the film was a notorious flop at the time. A wildly experimental venture (former San Diegan Zappa had a cameo in it and Jack Nicholson co-wrote the script), "Head" still stands as perhaps the most overt exercise in commercial suicide, ever, by a major pop-music act.

That said, it was a rare treat to hear "Head" gems like the moody "As We Go Along" and the shape-shifting "The Porpoise Song." The latter song at times suggested parts of Jimi Hendrix's version of "Hey Joe" melded with The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

Then there was "Daddy's Song," which was written by the late, great Harry Nilsson. On Thursday, it featured a film clip of a fresh-faced Jones dancing a duet with Toni Basil (who, in 1982, scored a chart-topping hit with "Mickey").